I made a huge mistake in describing the vote in Florida, confusing Nader's 97 thousand votes with Buchanan's 17 thousand. The non-voting numbers are so great, however, that it makes no change in my description of the Nader vote as a "miniscule" portion of the voters who might have voted for Gore but didn't.

From Wikipedia, presidential Election 2000:

Bush: 2,912,790
Gore: 2,912,253
---------------------
Difference: 537

Nader: 97,488

I also used the voting-age population for the figure of 12 million instead of the more conservative voter-eligible estimate of 10,667,193.

HOWEVER, 44% of these sat out the election, or 4,693,565 (rounded to whole numbers). If we assume, based on the actual vote, that half of these would have preferred Gore to Bush if you held a gun to their heads, that gives us 2,346,782.

If we add the Nader voters, we have 2,444,270 voters who might have voted for Gore but effectively threw their ballots away. Of this group of wasted votes, the Nader vote is a mere 4%.

Now obviously the largest number of these "eligible voters" were indifferent, hostile to both candidates--like the Naderites--or unreachably apathetic. But if you consider only the top 2.5%, those 2 standard deviations above the mean in the direction of Gore support, those on the voting-nonvoting border, that's 61,107 votes that were low-hanging fruit for a slightly more enthusiastic GOTV campaign, more than 100 times the amount necessary to defeat Bush.

I apologize for messing up, and for the blizzard of figures, but the point stands: Nader voters had nothing to do with Gore's defeat. He lost because he didn't get as many voters to the polls in Florida as his opponent. (And because he was jobbed by the state of Florida and the Supreme Court.)